World TB Day: One million kids suffer from TB annually, says survey

Washington,
Mon, 24 Mar 2014NI Wire

Despite the facts that we have achieved major success in the field
of medical science and medicines, it is the fact that the number of children
suffering from tuberculosis (TB) annually has doubled since 2011. The shocking
facts in the entire matter are that the truth is existing despite improved
medication and government as well as aid agencies efforts. The facts have been revealed on the occasssion of World TB Day today.

According to sources, researchers from Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) and
Harvard Medical School (HMS) in Boston have estimated that around one million
children suffer from TB annually- twice the number previously thought to have
tuberculosis and three times the number that are diagnosed every year, the
researchers claimed.

The researchers also estimated that around 32,000 children suffer from
multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) annually. “Despite children comprising
approximately one quarter of the world's population, there have been no previous
estimates of how many suffer from MDR-TB disease,” explained Ted Cohen, an
associate professor of medicine at BWH.

“Our estimate of the total number of new cases of childhood TB is twice than
estimated by the WHO in 2011 and three times the number of child TB cases
notified globally each year,” said Cohen, who is also an associate professor at
Harvard School of Public Health.

According to co-author Mercedes Becerra, an associate professor at HMS, “TB in a
child is recognised as a sentinel event. It tells us about ongoing transmission
and missed opportunities for prevention.”

In order to obtain these estimates, the researchers used several sources of
publicly available data and devised a new method to correct for the chronic
under-diagnosis that occurs in children, using conventional TB tests which were
designed for and work best on adults. The researchers used two models to
estimate both the regional and global annual incidence of MDR-TB in children.

Their findings indicate that around 1,000,000 children developed TB disease in
2010 and of those, 32,000 had MDR-TB. These findings, published in the
prestigious journal The Lancet, underscore the urgent need for expanded
investment in the global response to TB and MDR-TB in children.